A mule trader, a miner, a chimney sweep, mill hands, sharecroppers,
ex-slaves, and small farmers - Southerners enduring the Depression
as best they can - talk about their hard-scrabble lives, stunted
dreams, and daily chores. What the photographs of Walker Evans
portrayed visually, this volume, compiled under the auspices of the
Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s, voices. A sequel to These
Are Our Lives, published in 1939, this is oral history with the
original dialects, colloquialisms, and griefs retained. Income for
tenant farmers at this time averaged $312 a year and the opinion
expressed by one poor white tenant farmer's wife is echoed by many
others: "We seem to move around in circles like the mule that pulls
the syrup mill. We are never still but we never get anywhere." The
memories reach back to the Civil War and Emancipation, seen from
both white and black perspectives ("them Yankees didn't have
nothing to give us after they'd freed us"), and the present is
keenly felt in the impact of New Deal programs ("Lord Bless that
Old Age! Patey and me don't have to burden our children"). For a
generation reared on post-WW II expectations and the industrial
boom of the "New South," this collection should be a revelation.
(Kirkus Reviews)
When "These Are Our Lives" was first published by The University of
North Carolina Press in 1939, the late Charles A. Beard hailed it
as "literature more powerful than anything I have read in fiction,
not excluding Zola's most vehement passages." A very early
experiment in the publication of oral history, it consisted of
thirty-five life histories of sharecroppers, farmers, mill workers,
townspeople, and the unemployed of the Southeast, selected from
over a thousand such histories collected by the Federal Writers'
Project in the 1930s. It was the Press' intention to publish
several more volumes from the material that had been amassed, but
World War II forced the cancellation of those plans.
The editors of "Such As Us" have taken up the abandoned task and
have produced a volume every bit as rich as its predecessor. From
the perspective of forty years we can now read these stories as
vivid chapters in the social history of the South, reaching as far
back as slavery times and as far forward as the eve of World War
II.
To the modern reader the people speaking in this book may at first
seem quaint, like curious from a past time and a different world.
They worked on farms, in mills, oil fields, coal mines, and other
people's homes. Their life histories provide a view of the world
they saw, experienced, and helped to create. They tell about family
life, religion, sex roles, being poor, and getting old, and they
describe how major events -- the Civil War, Emancipation, World War
I, the Great Depression, and the New Deal -- affected them. These
accounts offer the reader the chance to experience vicariously the
world these people lived in -- to know, for example, the wife of
the tenant farmer who commented, "We seem to move around in circles
like the mule that pulls the syrup mill. We are never still, but we
never get anywhere."
"Such as Us" is a contribution to the history of anonymous
Americans. Like the former-slave narratives, which have become an
important primary source for the historian, these life histories
will enable the reader to reexamine traditional views and address
new questions about the South. By providing an introduction and
historical interchapters that place the histories in perspective,
the editors set these histories within the cultural context of the
1930s and illustrate the relationship between private lives and
public events. These life histories allow individuals to reach
across time and share their lives with us. Although the people who
speak in "Such As Us" are representatives of social types and
classes, they are also unique individuals -- a paradoxical truth
their life histories affirm.
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